Coffee Table

Zanzibar Books

We often get asked which books we would recommend. In association with Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk , we are happy to suggest a hand-picked selection of travel guides, reference books, travelogues and music. All titles relate to Zanzibar, Tanzania, East Africa, or Africa as a whole. Please click on the relevant title/s for more details and ordering information.

Coffee Table

Zanzibar Style

Gemma Pitcher, Javed Jafferji (Photographer)

Everyday life in Zanzibar is a riot of colour, texture and light. Walking around Stone Town or strolling on the beach, the visitor’s eye is constantly caught by fascinating details – a shady courtyard glimpsed through a window cut in a brass-studded door, or a Swahili proverb printed along the bottom of a lady’s colourful Kanga. Zanzibar Style focuses on these details, celebrating the natural style of the island’s inhabitants, their crafts, textiles and furniture, and examining the unique objets d’art hidden in the nooks and crannies of hotels and private houses. ‘Zanzibar Style’ defines and illustrates Zanzibar’s unique look in a sumptuous full colour book, featuring photographs by Javed Jafferji.

of Zanzibar

Javed Jafferji

For centuries the Zanzibar archipelago was visited by merchants from the Arabian peninsula, Persia and India who came in sailing ships blown across the ocean by the monsoon winds. In the nineteenth century, Sultan Seyyid Said of the Busaidi dynasty of Oman. transformed Zanzibar into the richest spice islands in the world, a centre of the slave trade and the gateway into the heart of Africa for explorers such as Livingstone and Burton. The islands are an exotic mixture of people and customs and ‘Images of Zanzibar’ explores this rich heritage in pictures, from Stone Town with its lingering atmosphere of the past, to the traditional fishing villages scattered around the coast.

Tanzania: African Eden

Graham Mercer, Javed Jafferji

Over the years there have been many “coffee-table” books on Tanzania and East Africa. This work rates with the best of them. The photographs by Javed Jafferji manage to cover the huge panorama of life in Tanzania, in both the human and animal domains. The accompanying text is accurate and amusing, demonstrating Mercer’s in depth knowledge of the people and the wildlife.

Kilimanjaro: to the Roof of Africa

Audrey Salkeld

A British prime minister in Queen Victoria’s England once dismissed Kilimanjaro as “that mountain behind Zanzibar with the unrememberable name.” Today, there can be few who don’t recognize its most beautiful and evocative name. The climb up Kilimanjaro has been likened to a journey from the equator to the poles, passing as it does through zone after zone of climatic change, from tropical forest to frozen desert. And Kilimanjaro’s human history is no less rich than its natural history. In Kilimanjaro: To the Roof of Africa, accomplished mountaineer and writer Audrey Salkeld presents a comprehensive and awe-inspiring portrait of this noble mountain and its myriad facets. Published in conjunction with the release of David Breashears’s stunning new IMAX® film about Kilimanjaro, this book is an extraordinary journey to the roof of Africa.

Serengeti: Natural Order on the African Plain

Mitsuaki Iwago (Photographer)

Within the vast boundaries of the Serengeti, millions of animals live and die, as they have for thousands of years. Consisting of about 300 photographs, this book presents one year on the African plain. Iwago’s photographs capture the essence of a sometimes brutal, sometimes idyllic, always fascinating life.